Actually.. Liberals are not very pleased with Harry Reid and will not be sorry if he loses the election. Having 60 Democratic senators means nothing (apparently), so if some seats are lost, that doesn't really matter. Nothing is getting done in Congress now, so the loss of some seats isn't going to change anything.

There's some other Democratic senators that I'm happy to see retire and/or lose their seats as well.

JMK: "His demeanor, at his very best, is positively funereal..." I LOVE it! Great word!

LR: (1)No...those guys were much better looking. (2) They were so excited to get 60 senate votes and now they pretend it does not matter.

Tom: All around the blogosphere Democrats were hoping, hoping, hoping to get those 60, fillabuster proof seats and when it happened they were positively giddy. I read Huffpo, XO Sue (capital "S") and others who were beside themselves.

But I guess that took up too much room, so they're not beside themselves any more. Now it really doesn't matter.

"Having 60 Democratic senators means nothing (apparently), so if some seats are lost, that doesn't really matter. Nothing is getting done in Congress now, so the loss of some seats isn't going to change anything." (Tom)

While Reid has been an ineffective "leader" of the Senate for Democrats, it really isn't the Senate that's been the problem for the Liberal-wing of that Party.

The ONE Bill in which the Senate was NOT able to push through a compromise on a passed House Bill was on the current health care monstrosity.

And remember, the House barely passed that and by a SINGLE vote!

The problem the Liberal Dems have right now is ideological. Back in 2006 and 2008, Rahm Emmanuel was one of the architects of the Blue Dog coalition.

That was a brilliant strategy, running Conservative (Blue Dog) Dems down South and out West, but it's had some unexpected consequences since then.

Often these Blue Dogs ran to the Right of their more Moderate GOP foes, especially on guns and the border.

Now the cost of having a full quarter of the Democrats in Congress being part of that "Blue Dog Coalition," is gumming up the works for Liberals.

But that started early, when the Blue Dogs sided with the GOP to override Liberal Democrat objections to Obama's seeking to continue the NSA Surveillance Program....and its continued unabated since.

There is a very strong ideological split between Conservative Democrats and their more Liberal cohorts.

I know people are reflexively going to blame Reid and Pelosi, but as much as I dislike the politics of both of them, I have to acknowledge that it's Rahm Emmanuel and Chuck Schumer (of all people...in the Senate) for exacerbating this ideological schism in my own Party.

What Pelosi and Reid are guilty of is not being able to find ways to "give that coalition something to get something Liberals want. Instead, BOTH Pelosi and Reid have sought to strong-arm, threaten and isolate those who don't go along...and it really hasn't appeared to have worked very well.

I've been a registered Democrat since 1972.....I consider myself a "Zell Miller Democrat," although I'm probably even a bit to the Right of him, while being largely Libertarian economically.

If the Democrats were able to elect people closer to Al Franken in Montana, Virginia and a few other places, we'd be well on the way to what is often misnamed a "European socialist" economy by now....we might even be well on the way to being Greece (if we were lucky with that fatally flawed system).

Instead the Liberal Democrats have an uneasy (and its getting uneasier by the minute) "alliance" with these new Blue Dogs in their midst.

"Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand snarky words....And it IS good news compared with what job losses were under Bush." (Shaw Kenawe)

The implosion occurred in 2008, but that was a Keynesian implosion, caused by incompetent government officials getting involved in the mortgage industry.

Idiotic legislators forced banks to "invest" (loan more money in their immediate communities) starting in the late 1970s. Records showed that through 1978 most banks situated in urban or "inner city" areas often "invested" less than 10% of their portfolio in those communities.

That wasn't, as the incompetents in D.C. though, "predatory bankers treating poor people badly, it was Businesses (in this case banks) doing what was best for the most important people to that business....NOT its customers, but its shareholders.

That "housing activism" continued at a slow pace through the 80s before exploding in a series of litigations in the 90s, when both Henry Cisneros at HUD and Janet Reno took banks to court over their lending criteria having a "disparate impact" on low income Americans.

The banks capitulated and began offering more "high risk loans" and had to be saved by the first wave of bank bailouts in the late 1990s, after over $1 TRILLION in bad loans were extended.

During that period Keynesians of BOTH Parties piled on this idiocy. Jack Kemp pushed "the Ownership Society" which became a mantra for all "Moderate Republicans (the Bush's McCain, Whitman, etc.).

Bush made "decreasing the black/white home-ownership gap a major priority of his administration and signed onto the 0% Down FHA Mortgage....some mortgage brokers even financed 130% of the purchase price to cover closing costs, etc.

Between 2000 and 2008 over $4 TRILLION in high risk/subprime loans were made and during that time, Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's share of the mortgage market went from 24% (which was even then considered way too high by most economists) to a whopping 51% of that market, virtually ALL of that increase in subprime loans.

It was certainly a bipartisan fiasco, BUT it was entirely a Keynesian (Big Government) disaster....a lesson that's gone unlearned, given that we're now on a hyper-Keynesian course, with the deficit spending jumping from a high of 3% of GDP under the previous administration to 10% today.

Joe - I googled your fine words and found out that they are simply Shakespearean insults. There were three lists and you can mix and match - so to speak. They can be read before the recitation of any Shakespearean play or sonnet.

Time (EST)

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